With the increasing popularity of the Internet (e.g., World Wide Web), businesses, including commercial enterprises, government and academia, can communicate with one another, for example, through electronic procurement (e-procurement) systems or electronic marketplaces (e-marketplaces). Many such marketplaces and/or trading networks have emerged and are commercially available, for example, WebSphere Commerce Suite Marketplace Edition (trademark of IBM Corporation), Ariba Buyer and Ariba Marketplace (trademarks of Ariba, Inc.), Market Set (trademark of SAPMarkets Inc.), and ConnectTrade (trademark of Metiom, Inc.).
Since there is no standard communication protocol which is used for all procurement systems, each of the conventional procurement systems and marketplaces may use different interaction protocols to communicate between buyers, the procurement system or marketplace, and suppliers for browsing catalogs, creating quotes or shopping carts, sending orders, etc. For example, Ariba has defined a punch-out process with messages defined in a Commerce XML (cXML) protocol, Metiom uses an Open Buying on the Internet (OBI) protocol, mySAP utilizes a protocol known as Open Catalog Interface (OCI), and other vendors have defined additional protocols. These protocols are stateful, meaning that data sent in one of the messages between the entities is used in a subsequent interchange between the entities. More specifically, the communications between the entities typically occurs in a long running conversation comprised of a sequence of messages, with the information contained in one message in the conversation being used in the content of later messages.
Presently, in a conventional e-commerce architecture buyers using a given procurement system or marketplace are limited to transacting with suppliers which implement the same protocol as that specified by the given procurement system or marketplace. Therefore, there is a need for a framework which enables buyers utilizing a procurement system or marketplace employing one (stateful) protocol to transact with a supplier or marketplace using another (stateful) protocol.